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A fundamental aspect of creating superior digital experiences in the cloud is understanding the health of your scalable and adaptable infrastructure alongside application performance. For numerous organizations, gaining deeper insights translates into a more comprehensive understanding of their entire cloud and hybrid technology stack. This enables proactive management of user experience while continuously evaluating the environment for potential risks.
AppDynamics, a Cisco product, serves as a comprehensive application and business performance monitoring solution that allows organizations to prioritize their workflows with a unified perspective. This ensures that cloud-native applications deliver significant business value in real-time production settings. Through context-aware visualizations and correlated insights across various application domains, users can confidently develop cloud-native applications, linking deployments directly to business outcomes.
Amazon CloudWatch provides a monitoring and observability service that supplies customers with data and actionable insights to oversee applications, respond to changes in system-wide performance, optimize resource utilization, and acquire a unified view of operational health. Working in tandem, AppDynamics can access data from Amazon CloudWatch metrics via the AWS metric retrieval API endpoint known as GetMetricData. This functionality allows for the retrieval of up to 500 different metrics in a single request, aggregating a total of 100,800 data points per call.
Additionally, users can perform mathematical expressions on the data to easily extract insights from CloudWatch metrics regarding the operational health and performance of their infrastructure as it evolves and potentially becomes more complex over time.
Enhanced Cloud Integration
In October 2020, AppDynamics introduced a cloud-native visualization user interface that integrates seamlessly with Amazon CloudWatch, ingesting AWS-hosted entities and data in real-time. This advancement offers a comprehensive solution for visibility across various layers of AWS applications. Notable enhancements to the highly extensible cloud platform include intelligent, out-of-the-box application topology discovery and mapping, enabling exploration of integrated dynamic and static application topologies through a new full-stack observability platform.
Moreover, these improvements extend coverage to reliably connect the business transaction topology to a multitude of AWS services, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Aurora (MySQL), Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon MQ, Amazon API Gateway, and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC).
The Importance of Cloud-Native Visualization
In traditional on-premises environments with physical and virtual machines, the only way to establish an application’s topology and its associated services is by tagging and tracking every transaction that flows through the system during operation. Once this is accomplished, a dynamic topology view can be formulated. This perspective encompasses individual requests to transactions and various paths through application services without necessitating redeployment.
As an AWS Advanced Technology Partner with competencies in Migration, Mobile, and DevOps, AppDynamics represents this topology through a flow map. The business transaction flow map illustrates how individual transactions traverse application service tiers, while the application flow map overlays these transaction flow maps onto a comprehensive application-wide flow map.
Historically, the AppDynamics interface divided monitoring types and objects (such as databases) separately. While this approach provided solid insights into discrete services, it lacked an overall sense of interconnectedness. Given the rapid growth of cloud adoption and the urgent need for IT teams to correlate application and infrastructure data across domains, AppDynamics seized the opportunity to revamp their data model, fostering a more intuitive representation of connectivity.
The underlying infrastructure of cloud-native applications is typically predefined with metadata, establishing a static topology that remains unchanged as new event metadata arrives. For instance, a static topology may illustrate existing machines, their attached network interfaces, and the VPCs housing those interfaces. The capability to programmatically alter and update topologies on demand has revealed how the underlying code constituting a topology can also be a potential source of application issues, emphasizing the need for real-time visualization of these topologies.
Jobvite, an applicant tracking system and recruiting software, helps companies attract, hire, and onboard top talent. With millions of job seekers and recruiters utilizing Jobvite annually, the company recognized the necessity of delivering an application experience that would enhance loyalty and drive retention. To achieve this goal, they partnered with AppDynamics.
“At Jobvite, balancing development speed, quality, and innovation simultaneously presents a challenge, and we cannot afford to compromise on any of these aspects,” states Ron Teeter, Chief Architect at Jobvite. “With AppDynamics’ new cloud-native capabilities, businesses can identify more issues early in the development process and address them before they affect customers.
“AppDynamics enables us to shift left and deliver our most critical products to market quicker, while still maintaining the high-quality standards our customers expect and deserve,” adds Teeter.
Operational Mechanics
AppDynamics maps the dynamic application service topology using its new flexible metadata model, while Amazon CloudWatch supplies the static infrastructure topology. Together, they pinpoint where these two topologies should be integrated. For instance, when application services are deployed as load-balanced sets of service instances with their own network interfaces, links representing requests flowing between application services may traverse VPC gateways, application load balancers, or other cloud network devices or services.
As part of this new release, AppDynamics collects the following metrics through the GetMetricData API (subject to modification in future releases):
Specific metrics: 10-20 metrics each for the supported AWS services. Below are some of the metrics AppDynamics gathers using the API; not all of them are displayed in the frontend.
- Amazon EC2: “CPUUtilization”, “DiskReadOps”, “DiskWriteOps”, “NetworkIn”, “NetworkOut”, “DiskReadBytes”, “DiskWriteBytes”, “NetworkPacketsIn”, “NetworkPacketsOut”.
- Amazon EBS: “VolumeReadBytes”, “VolumeWriteBytes”, “VolumeReadOps”, “VolumeWriteOps”, “VolumeTotalReadTime”, “VolumeTotalWriteTime”.
- Amazon RDS: “CPUUtilization”, “FreeableMemory”, “NetworkTransmitThroughput”, “DatabaseConnections”, “BinLogDiskUsage”, “ReadIOPS”, “ReadLatency”, “ReadThroughput”, “WriteIOPS”, “WriteLatency”, “WriteThroughput”.
- Elastic Load Balancing: “HealthyHostCount”, “UnHealthyHostCount”, “ActiveConnectionCount”, “ClientTLSNegotiationErrorCount”, “HTTPCode_ELB_XXX_Count”, “Requ.
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